How consumers can become the producers

A while back I saw this video on the 'Kinect Effect' and it really got me thinking about the power consumers have over products. "Kinect hackers" are rewriting the rules of Kinect, finding new ways of using it, which, in turn, transforms the product into something different. By consuming products, consumers are becoming the producers. This is powerful.

Think of Apple's app store too, which created the opportunity for anyone to produce a product that could be purchased anywhere in the world at the click of a button. To some extent, Facebook works on a similar logic, in that its users are actually producing the content they are consuming: Facebook is free partly because users are not the ones consuming Facebook, Facebook is the one consuming users (this, of course, is up for debate). Open source has created a new way of approaching consumption and the relationship between consumer and producer. I wonder, where does Marx fit into the discussion on open source? Are his arguments still relevant?

The source of this change in the role of consumers is not necessarily the consumers however. People have always found uses for products different to those intended by the producers. What has changed is the producer's attitude. Microsoft, for example, embraced what was happening to Kinect - this ad is proof in itself. But what questions does this raise about intellectual property? Do Kinect's new uses belong to Microsoft? To its users? Or to everyone?